Teach English in Roddickton Bide Arm - TEFL Courses

The study of phonology is one of the most, if not the most, important aspects of speaking skills. Language teachers must understand students' barrier of communication due to mispronunciations. Nothing can be more discouraging and frustrating to speakers when they hear words like “Whaaat?”, “Can you reeepeat, please?”, “I caaan't underrrrstaaaand what you are saaaying!” etc. The knowledge of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) empowers english learners to produce vast amount of words correctly only with a help of a dictionary easily accessible nowadays. Thus, the learning of the IPA, one aspect of phonology, can greatly benefit english learners. Many teachers unfortunately shy away from teaching the IPA for they are not well versed. The confusions are often created due to the variations in use of the IPA. The number of phoneme keys and what they define as vowels and consonants are different from one dictionary to another. The list of dictionaries and textbooks with the number of phoneme keys used is as follows: Online Dictionary/Book Title No. of Consonants No. of Vowels Tot. No. of Keys (1) Ditionary.com (IPA version) Ditionary.com (Spelled version) (2) TheFreeDitionary.com (3) BeeDictionary.com (4) LDOCEonline.com (Longman) (5) english Pronunciation Made Simple by Paulette Dale (6) Focus on Pronunciation by Linda Lane 25 25 Unclassified 24 25 24 24 22 20 Unclassified 17 22 17 14 47 45 45 41 47 42 38 As to the consonants, according to the above references, there are 24 common consonants and only two additional consonants, ‘hw' as in what by Dictionary.com (1) and ‘x' as in loch by Longman (2). However, for the vowels, there are too many variations as to what are considered as monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs. Furthermore, the above does not define the threshold level for distinguishing how a phoneme is determined. For example, is ‘ear' a vowel (diphthong) as claimed by (1) or a combination of two monophthongs (a vowel ‘ea' and a consonant 'r'? As another example, is ‘fire' a consonant of ‘f' and a triphthong ‘ire' as claimed by (1) – or a consonant ‘f' with a diphthong ‘i' plus a consonant ‘r'? The Dictionary.com distinguishes ‘ah' as in father and ‘o' as is in waffle. A simple quiz with ten (10) questions was prepared and given to two native speakers, Americans. For each question, a word containing one of the two phonemes is given for the test takers to guess which one of the two phonemes is used. Another test was conducted to the same two natives using the same dictionary and the same quiz format. This time the test questions were ‘ur' as in early and ‘er' as in teacher. The quiz was given WITHOUT TEACHING the fact that ‘ur' is stressed and the ‘er' is unstressed but only emphasizing the fact the two sounds are different. The numbers of correct answers were 4 & 5 and 5 & 6 for the first and second quizzes, respectively. The scores were not any better than the score one would be getting simply guessing at the questions. The result can be considered as a statistically significant, even though it was given to only a two persons, if the chance of the person obtaining a correct answer is considered as 95% or higher for each question. Obviously, the two natives did not know the differences in the phonemes from the two quizzes respectively. The subtleties or the threshold levels of what is distinguished as a distinct phoneme must be lowered so that the only sounds discernable to average native speakers are included. In other words, the IPA must be simplified omitting sounds difficult to be recognizable to average native speakers. Let linguists argue as to how the sounds undistinguishable should be classified in their own realm of studies. teachers should not be confused with different IPA charts, and they should be confident to tell students as to how they have adapted the IPA chart, redefining the vowels or consonants to the minimum possible, not accepting as a phoneme an average native speaker cannot decipher.